Members Extreme Mixing Posted December 16, 2006 Members Share Posted December 16, 2006 Originally posted by Bruce Swedien Extremie... Yes!!! Yes!!! Yes!!! Why are all you forumites so pre-occupied with being cute in your responses??? Don't forget, a little cute goes a long way.... I'm getting a bit bored with you!!! Bruce Swedien Thanks, Bruce. Some days, it can be difficult to get into the work we are doing, and it helps to have a few tricks to entice ourselves inside the music. I usually start with the things I know I have to do. I set up sends, listen, fix mistakes, or errors that are bothering me, memorizing the parts and the arrangement, making markers...the more mechanical part of the process. Out of that process I find the things that are most interesting to me, and I use those to form the foundation of the mix, and I start bringing other things in around them. A "list" begins to form in my mind, and as I start to complete the tasks on my list, more things come to mind, and I get a clear picture of where I'm going. Once that happens, it's pretty easy to get there--I just chip away at all the stuff that doesn't look like an elephant, and in the end, I have something that resembles an elephant to me. Steve Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Bruce Swedien Posted December 17, 2006 Author Members Share Posted December 17, 2006 Originally posted by Extreme Mixing Thanks, Bruce. Some days, it can be difficult to get into the work we are doing, and it helps to have a few tricks to entice ourselves inside the music. I usually start with the things I know I have to do. I set up sends, listen, fix mistakes, or errors that are bothering me, memorizing the parts and the arrangement, making markers...the more mechanical part of the process. Out of that process I find the things that are most interesting to me, and I use those to form the foundation of the mix, and I start bringing other things in around them. A "list" begins to form in my mind, and as I start to complete the tasks on my list, more things come to mind, and I get a clear picture of where I'm going. Once that happens, it's pretty easy to get there--I just chip away at all the stuff that doesn't look like an elephant, and in the end, I have something that resembles an elephant to me. Steve Steve and all my Forum Friends.... When I said... Don't forget, a little cute goes a long way.... I'm getting a bit bored with you!!! I'm not really getting bored with you..... I'm just trying to get all of you to see the seriousness of what we do in Recording Music. I've always been very serious about what I do... That fact only indicates how much I love Recordng Music. I hope you feel the same. Ask Steve - He's out there somewhere lookng for his elephant! I absolutely love all of you.... You remind me a bit of myself..... With that said... Check this out.... _____________________________________________________________ In the old days things moved much faster in the studio. In the 1950's and early 1960's we would book the studio for a three hour session, and when we were through we would walk out of the studio with four songs finished, ready to master. Nowadays everything takes much longer.... It seems like we dwell on teeny little parts of the music forever. Does this fact make it impossible for us to keep our musical and emotional perspective? I think it is absolutely possible to keep your perspective, if you learn to trust your instincts as much as possible. This capability takes a long time to master. Even given that knowledge, most recording people can't seem to trust their emotions. I constantly refer to my earliest mixes, of a song, and even more, to my computerized mixes of the original rhythm track, to get back to my very first instinctive reaction to the music, the moment it first effected me. That would be the only time that I would have been able to react to the music emotionaly and not cerebrally. I will then make sound volume level and color judgements that are totally emotional in their relationship to each other, as perceived by my psyche, with all my musical experiences subconciously effecting the outcome of what I am doing with the music at that moment. I think I am lucky, in that I love details in anything that I am involved in. Especially music recording. I love the technical end of what we do in the studio now. I think I love the computer and technical aspect of modern music recording so much that I don't ever get bored with it. Every small, little detail fascinates me. I think I have become a bonafide, card-carrying computer nerd! Another strange thing about my personality is that I absolutely hate surprises. Possibly I am a control freak. In recording music I want to know exactly how every technical aspect of the process will work. That's not easy when one of the most fascinating things about music is it's spontaneity! I have always felt that in recording music you can luck into or luck up on something once, but never twice. It's like getting lightning to strike twice in the same place. I try to reduce the mechanical and mundane segments of the recording process to pure science. When I press a button I want to know exactly what the result will be. I consider myself an artist, in the recording studio. As such I try always to remember that just as a fine artist such as a Van Gogh never attempts to paint the precise reality of a scene or landscape,(which he cannot do anyway), instead he captures the emotion of his interpretation on the canvas; I realized long ago that I couldn't paint the reality of a sonic image. We can't even define reality. The feeling of the music is what I am after. I want people to be able to listen to the music and to experience the sincerity of it's emotion. I don't want to hide the feeling of the music under a lot of meaningless, technical white-wash. I am very much turned off by recordings that are, to me, the obvious result of someone merely "knobbing-about" in the studio trying to make a recording that sounds very much like all the other recordngs of the day. Not that I am against using any and all tricks-of-the-trade. That's not it at all. I will do anything neccessary to paint a sonic image that has both entertainment and feeling as part of it's tapestry. Steve...... Have you often found the elephant? It's not easy, but it is possible... Bruce Swedien Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Extreme Mixing Posted December 17, 2006 Members Share Posted December 17, 2006 Originally posted by Bruce Swedien Steve...... Have you often found the elephant? It's not easy, but it is possible... Bruce Swedien Yes, Bruce. I always find my elephant. I think that's the way Michael Angelo did it, too. He just chipped away all the marble that didn't look like David, and there he was! I did a jazz record last year that was really fun. We did 13 songs in two days. My monitor mixes went on to the record, pretty much unchanged. That's about as close to the 60's as can you get in 2006. Sometimes projects are different. They are recorded by others of questionable ability. Some are like shattered pieces of glass on the floor, and from that I try to make a vase, or a pitcher, or a simple drinking cup. It's definitely more like art than science. I really love this job and have for the past 25 years. I take it seriously, but maintain a sense of joy. I think you can always hear that in the music. With engineering, I think you have to know the technology and the techniques, but in the end you have to do what you feel. Period. It's the same with musicians. They should know what they are doing, but play what feels right. Steve Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Bruce Swedien Posted December 17, 2006 Author Members Share Posted December 17, 2006 Originally posted by Extreme Mixing Yes, Bruce. I always find my elephant. I think that's the way Michael Angelo did it, too. He just chipped away all the marble that didn't look like David, and there he was! I did a jazz record last year that was really fun. We did 13 songs in two days. My monitor mixes went on to the record, pretty much unchanged. That's about as close to the 60's as can you get in 2006. Sometimes projects are different. They are recorded by others of questionable ability. Some are like shattered pieces of glass on the floor, and from that I try to make a vase, or a pitcher, or a simple drinking cup. It's definitely more like art than science. I really love this job and have for the past 25 years. I take it seriously, but maintain a sense of joy. I think you can always hear that in the music. With engineering, I think you have to know the technology and the techniques, but in the end you have to do what you feel. Period. It's the same with musicians. They should know what they are doing, but play what feels right. Steve Steve..... I like you... You are what The Music Recording industry needs. Thanks... Bruce Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members MorePaul Posted December 17, 2006 Members Share Posted December 17, 2006 Originally posted by spokenward there are a bunch of specialists in neuroscience who are doing research on simultaneous visual auditory processing Pat, there was a decently accessible ook on music & Neuropsych from a couple years ago called "Cognitive Neuroscience of Music " (possibly "and music") it was essentially a collection of journal articals, but good It does remind me of Yo-Yo Ma mentioning that he would have a student play the same piece looking in a practice room then looking out the window and digging on how if affects the performance. how context affects our interpretations is some pretty powerful stuff I'd be interested to see some neuropsych (or even just bahavioral psych -- the wife's a neuropsych, so that always interests me) on how the concept of Samay (basically, attaching a rag to a certain "time" -- a time of day, a season, etc) plays out there in terms of creating a perceptual bias or resonance and how much of it is culturally instilled (side note - of interest to you might be some of Diana Deutsch's work. She works of music perception and has done a lot of work on how it can vary from culture to culture with some interesting linguistic tie-ins) It's all connected, somehow. It does seem to tend to be so "subjects" themselves tend to be sort of functional definitions -- we use them to aid our heuristics. Often, when we see someone "cutting across topics or subjects", I think it may be merely that their axes (as in axis) are at a different angle than our own. Some even caution against the construct of subject Knowledge is one. Its divisioninto subjects is a concession to human weakness" Sir Halford John MacKinder (did a lot of groundbreaking work in geopolotics) "good"/"bad"?? "right"/"wrong"? meh... I find myself thinking that differences in views are like friends facing each ther at table - to one, the wine is on the left-hand side, to the other, the wine is to the right Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members spokenward Posted December 17, 2006 Members Share Posted December 17, 2006 excerpted Originally posted by MorePaul It does remind me of Yo-Yo Ma mentioning that he would have a student play the same piece looking in a practice room then looking out the window and digging on how if affects the performance.how context affects our interpretations is some pretty powerful stuff That's what I was thinking about. I have sometimes kept a small book of Ansel Adams view camera photography at hand when mixing. That seemed to work on a lot of levels - conscious and unconscious. No matter how big the subject is, the images are somehow contained. They have impossibly huge scale. The focus is complex. Their natural beauty is inspiring. I thought that my mixes were bigger and more together. Not all of our processing is in a rack - our best stuff is between our ears. I think that the esteemed Craig A. had a picture book tip in the Tip issue. I didn't feel quite so nutty after reading that. I find myself thinking that differences in views are like friends facing each ther at table - to one, the wine is on the left-hand side, to the other, the wine is to the right I think this leads neatly back to Bruce's theme of richly perceiving the relationship between things and then managing those things. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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